Optical character recognition is the mechanical or electronic conversion of images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text, whether from a scanned document, a photo of a document, a scene-photo (for example the text on signs and billboards in a landscape photo) or from subtitle text superimposed on an image (for example from a television broadcast). OCR can be used as a form of information entry from printed paper data records, whether passport documents, invoices, bank statements, computerized receipts, business cards, mail, printouts of static-data, or other documentation. OCR can be used to digitize printed texts so that they can be electronically edited, searched, stored more compactly, and displayed on-line.